Thousands honor slain officers

SAN JOSE She was an adventurer, a traveler who loved her small beach town and spent weekends enjoying its parks and beaches with her longtime boyfriend and two young sons.

He was a sports fan who persuaded his only son to follow him into police service and was starting to talk about retirement.

The portraits were painted by colleagues who honored Santa Cruz police Sgt. Loran “Butch” Baker, 51, and Officer Elizabeth Butler, 38, barely a week after the detectives were shot and killed during a routine investigation of a former soldier with a criminal past.

“Two heroes, two friends, taken from us far too soon at the hands of a madman,” said Santa Cruz Police Chief Kevin Vogel. “Someone sick and unstable, and yet someone who would have gotten a fair shake from Elizabeth and Butch had he just given them a chance.”

Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Baker and Butler were “a perfect fit for Santa Cruz,” a region he represented in Congress, calling it “sometimes a little offbeat, sometimes a little different, but always, always a place where people enjoy life for what it is and share in the sense that our lives are secure.”

Community members and law enforcement officials lined the procession route for a convoy of police and emergency vehicles that escorted the hearse from Santa Cruz to San Jose for the memorial service.

“It's sad that building community comes from tragedy, but at the same time, here we are, standing together,” Santa Cruz resident Margie Way said. “It's just ever so sad.”

Gov. Jerry Brown joined about 6,000 people in HP Pavilion for the memorial. A few hundred more watched a live feed at a basketball arena in Santa Cruz.

“These officers were doing something I've done hundreds, if not thousands of times,” said Tustin police Capt. Mike Shanahan, who drove 400 miles to represent his agency. “We're all thinking, there but for the grace of God go I.”

Authorities say that when the detectives went to Jeremy Goulet's door, he went out another exit and ambushed them with a. 45-caliber handgun.

Laid off from a job at a coffee shop days earlier, Goulet, 35, had a passport and an airplane ticket to New Mexico when he died a short time later.

Baker, with the department for 28 years, is survived by his wife, son and two daughters. His son is a Santa Cruz police officer.

Friend and former colleague Jeff Rosell, a chief deputy district attorney for Santa Cruz County, described Baker as a consummate police officer who even as a child “would arrest and then handcuff his stuffed animals.”

Butler, a 10-year veteran of the department, is survived by her longtime partner, Peter Wu, and their two sons. As he held their 5-year-old son, Joaquin, who was clutching a teddy bear and had a police uniform cap sliding over his eyes, Wu said the children “will always know what a great person their mom was.”

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